Beatrice Arthur had a long and incredibly productive life, but it was still sad to hear the news of her death Saturday at the age of 87.
Most of the obituary writers focused on her television work — Arthur had the good fortune to star in not one but two long-running situation comedies (“Maude” — right — and “The Golden Girls”).
I enjoyed the TV work, but always thought of Arthur as a stage actress, maybe because I was lucky enough to see her play Vera Charles in the original Broadway production of “Mame” (opposite another stage veteran who would find TV fame, Angela Lansbury).
“Mame” was the first Broadway musical I saw as a child — during its out of town try-out in Philadelphia in 1966 — and I can still remember how dazzled I was by the show and its two stars.
Lansbury and Arthur played larger-than-life “frenemies” who laid their cards on the table in one of the show’s best Jerry Herman tunes, “Bosom Buddies.”
Arthur also scored in Vera’s big show-within-the-show number, “The Man in the Moon (is a lady).”
The two stars went on to win Tonys for best actress and best featured actress.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Arthur had already been honing her stage chops for almost 20 years when “Mame” opened in Philly.
12 years before, she performed in the legendary Lotte Lenya production of “The 3 Penny Opera” that played a key role in off-Broadway becoming a viable commercial entity (the cast also included a very young and very unknown Jerry Orbach).
Between “3 Penny” and “Mame,” Arthur played the matchmaker in the original production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” but was bitterly disappointed when her juicy part was cut down during the try-out period.
In 2000, I had the privilege of interviewing Arthur when she worked in Westport on the one-woman show that would return the star to Broadway two years later.
The actress said one of the unique things about “Mame” was how little work needed to be done to get it in shape for Broadway.
“When we were in Philadelphia,” she told me, “Angela and I used to go to the movies in the afternoons. That was unheard of (during a try-out run). The audiences loved it right from the first performance.”
Arthur was a blast to interview. We talked about “Mame,” Lenya (a personal idol of Arthur’s) and the terrible 1974 movie version of “Mame” in which Arthur played Vera, but the title role went to Lucille Ball (a “disaster” in Arthur’s view — “the role belonged to Angela”).
